This afternoon, I watched a movie made in 1946, before I was even a twinkle in my Dad's eye.
It was Spencer Tracy & the great love of his life, Katharine Hepurn. It's not their affair that leads me to wonder.....
...what it was like in "midtown America" back then. Hard to picture anything in my mind's eye, except in black & white.
What gets me, & has always interested me about those old movies, is how accurately they display the American lifestyle of the time. Are those films an accurate depiction?
Did the fashions really include those fedoras the men always wear? And did they wear them always ? It's hard for me to fathom a sea (see what I just did there?) of those gray hats all over the country at all times of day, on males of any age. Sort of the baseball cap of the old millenium, if you will. Did they wear them backwards? Did even 3 year olds sport them?
What about women & their gloves. REALLY? White cotton with every ensemble. Makes me cringe to think that I can't even keep track of a pair of white socks.
But the kicker, what I'd really like to know, is whether the dialect was as demonstrated in these films. The cadence of their speech, for example. Like rapid machine gunfire. Did everyone speak so quickly? Was their diction so precise? Every sentence seems so...clipped. These people knew how to e-NUN-ciate!
If it is true and people really did converse in such a manner, what happened? When did our speech patterns morph into todays casual repartee'? I don't think I could've kept up, I'd be exhausted with the effort, so it worked out well, for me.
The best part in these movies are their figures of speech: "What, dahling,? do tell!" "I'll not have it !" I shan't!" (Really, I thought it might be set in London,but it was Connecticut, actually.)
Everyone in this story was addressed as "Mr./Mrs. Now, something I have never done is introduce two of my friends to each other, using titles, fercrissake.
If my parents were still alive (RIP, Bill & Urs) I could ask them, but alas, "I shall go to my grave wondering," "by gum!"
3 comments:
Ms Molly. . . does your mind ever shut OFF??? just wonderin. . how you pull these things out of the air, however, I shan't deny that I have at times wondered bout da hats and da gloves myself ;o)
I wonder some of the same things. I try to imagine what it would be like to ALWAYS wear a skirt, to never sit on the floor take stairs two at a time. Cannot. I'm interested in changing speech patterns and practices, too. Is it true that even husbands and wives at one time addressed each other with last names?
Hey, I remember Grandpa wearing one of those hats! I think Dad still has it somewhere... probably wherever the hunting rifle is....
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